A blog about the lives of a classical homeschooling family, in the idyllic Wet Coast, err, West Coast, of British Columbia. Oh, I know, it doesn't ALWAYS rain...it just seems like it.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Flower in the Garden

I'm taking that title from a cloth book FDPG used to have when she was 3 months old. We have a picture of her holding it and looking very quizzically at it, as if reading.

I was hanging out with some friends at the park the other day, when one mother asked me where we lived. I told her, and mentioned casually (well, as casually as an obsessed gardener possibly can) that I was turning the lawn into a garden. This is my Lure Remark, designed very specifically to see who I'm talking to: a garden enthusiast, or Someone Else. (snobby, aren't I)

I was totally unprepared for her answer. She turned to me with a slight look of disinterest, arched her eyebrows, and said "Hmm, what do you grow - flowers?" Since there isn't Hear-O-Vision on Blogger, you'll have to imagine the disdain the word "flowers" got from her. I was shocked. Horrified, even. I was that Edward Gorey woman in the Masterpiece Theatre intro, dropping her scarf and saying "Ohhhh! Ohhhh!" over and over again. She didn't like flowers! Say it isn't so! I wanted to transport her immediately into some high meadow somewhere, á la Sound of Music, and do some kind of fancy Cinderella waltz with cascading flowers (brought in by helpful talking animals), but I was too flabbergasted. Plus, I wondered a bit how she'd like dancing in meadows if she didn't like flowers...

Afterwards, I came home and comforted myself with a wander in the garden. The flower garden, I stress. I stared for a while. I contemplated. I shut my eyes and smelled. And wondered why more people don't see the The Importance of Being Earnest having flowers in their gardens.

So without further ado, here are some recent bouquets from my Flower Garden. All pictures are clickable if you want Big Views.

Here we have some sweet peas, fragrant and soft as clouds.

Next, a mixture of sage flowers, heuchera blossoms, sweet peas, and alchemilla. And here we have another mixture, this time some Maltese cross, some yarrow, lysimachia, alliums, double coreopsis, and some centaureas. I like the drama of the primary colours.This is part of Cloudscome's Sunday Garden Stroll, and you can see her and more gardeners on their own strolls at her blog: a wrung sponge.

How odd. Your flowers are beautiful. We have flowers, even in the vegetable beds but they get more neglected than things one can actually eat. I suspect that is a different kind of attitude to flower gardening than this woman had.